Every spring the United Nations releases the World Happiness Report and each year, since 2012, the United States has fallen in the rankings with both adults and adolescents reporting significantly less happiness than they did in the early 2000’s. While the economy has improved dramatically since the recessions of 2008, and with unemployment the lowest in decades, Americans get less and less happy as a whole each year.

This is not a worldwide trend.

Global poverty rates are falling. Now 87% of people in the world have access to electricity. Global literacy rates have been increasing for decades with 90% of people over the age of 15 able to read. Infant mortality rates are falling, as are teen pregnancy rates. TB and malaria rates have also fallen dramatically. It is unarguable that the quality of life in the world has increased in a measurable fashion over the last two decades, yet in the west we get more and more depressed. According to a Harris poll only a third of Americans report being happy.

This decline in happiness is indicative of the Easterlin Paradox, named after Richard Easterlin, the first economist to study happiness data. Easterlin disovered that at a point in time happiness varies directly with income both among and within nations, but over time happiness does not trend upward as income continues to grow. Essentially as the broader measure of the standard of living improves, we are not getting happier as a nation.

We all daydream. We all have hopes and dreams and visions of a better future. This is part of the human experience, and contrary to what our teachers and parents used to tell us daydreaming is a good thing— in moderation of course. The moment we stop dreaming of something better is the moment we accept our lot in life. It’s also good for us. In a 2013 article in National Geographic, University of Florida Psychiatrist Eugenio Rothe told author Christine Dell’Amore that, as our minds wander, different part of our brains activate, accessing information that may have previously been dormant or out of reach. According to Rothe, "This accounts for creativity, insights of wisdom and often the solutions to problems that the person had not considered."

Daydreaming (plus action of course) has driven human achievement to incredible levels. The mistake comes when we tie our happiness to this undetermined and undecided future.

“A more, better, someday is the enemy of your contentment.”

I came across the quote that I began this article with in Ryan Holiday’s book the Daily Stoic, and it really resonated. Like all the daily entries, Holiday introduces the chapter with a Stoic quote, this one from our old friend Epictetus: